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FDL Math Textbooks?
PyTHON71 asks: "I'm working through Schaum's Outlines of College Algebra. So far, in chapter 17 (conic sections), I've found 6 errors! Since I can spot them and correct them, I'm not worried about myself. But without math, you can't hack, and if young hackers are getting hung up on stupid math mistakes made by textbook authors... well, it's obviously a case for FDL textbooks. Are any textbooks being produced under the FDL?"
I love when people use acronyms that nobody knows. I also love the apparent lack of editorial process involved in selecting ask slashdot questions. Kthxbye.
I know when you're thinking in "math mode" the book is supposed to be correct, and that is supposed to be an inarguable given.
I think there is another perspective worth considering however.
There is the teenager (type K) that gets the right answer and can't make it match the one in the back of the book.
There is the teenager (type N) that sees a glimpse of "all that is math" (ok, a limited version) and is overwhelmed that they are having a hard time with Alg. 1 when they still have Geometry, Alg. 2, Trig, Pre-Calc, and Calculus just to get out of highschool and into a good college.
My observations were:
That type N teenagers outnumbered type K's by at least 5 to 1.
That type K students had attention spans on the order of double the length of that of the average teenagers, but that this was still usually in the vicinity of 20 minutes of frustration before, "giving up and asking the teacher the next day."
I also noticed type N students were consistently relieved to see that the book could get things wrong, though later in life I attributed this to sloppy publishing, they seemed to take it as a sign that the math they were doing was "hard to get right, even for the experts who write these books." This seemed to validate their struggles.
Though this event only happened twice, in my 5 years of high-school math, it's impact to me and the other student was noteworthy. I was a type K and can remember the day I told the Calculus teacher that I had a particular answer for a problem that didn't agree with the book, and (as good teachers often do) she wrote the problem on the board and talked through the steps as she did them to help me spot the logic error. The other students, envious of the ease with which math seemed to come to me, were glad of the opportunity to see me screw up in an illustratedly public fashion. The teacher came to the same answer I had, and when I told her so, she stepped back for a count of 1, as if that was all the time it took her to completely rework the problem in her head, and shrugged and said "Well, the book is wrong." and went back to her desk. Some several days later my ego came back down to a livable size, but I had forever shed the last vestiges of the std. teenager's insecurity, "I may not be smart enough to understand this."
My conclusion is:
Even if not for my, and another students, "special victories" over the oppressive self-righteousness of the HighSchoolPoliceState, my first three observations lead me to conclude that these errors, did at least as much good as harm. I also conclude that even the type K's benefited more than they lost, since having the type N's functioning at greater efficiency meant that they'd have to listen to fewer stupid questions during class, and noticeably less whining during the "quiet study" periods.
Even if this conclusion isn't valid for college math, a decent understanding of calculus is enough for all but the most formidable hacking. So I probably won't worry to much about the errors in HS math depriving the world of the "hacker class."
As to the issue of open text books. The university system and the people currently making large money on these things will fight an opensource version as tooth and claw as their O/S counterparts. The only advantage I can see is that their egos of university profs. will be to large too allow them to "play stupid." and foist it on others like, "...the people that made the PC fast and reliable." [Actual Microsoft Ad.]
Given how much code you could borrow from Project Gutenbergs supporters, a distributed document checking system for an FDL text book would be easy to set up and vastly improve the quality of the work. I certainly hope this comes about.